Sony Discuss Why They Won’t Let You Change Your PSN Name

It has to do with preventing griefers, apparently.

Hey guys. Guys. You know that PSN username you have? The one you made, probably way back in 2006, when the PS3 first came out and you were probably a 15 year old middle schooler and genuinely thought that the one you thought of was a cool username? You know how you’ve been wanting to change that, but you haven’t been able to, even though this is a feature that Steam, Xbox Live, and even Nintendo Network allow?

Well, if you’ve been wondering why Sony is dragging itself on what should be a relatively simple matter so much, they’ve come ahead and discussed the issue openly now, for the first time.

“We want to do name changing in a way that’s transparent, but also don’t let people morph themselves, either,” PlayStation’s Shawn Layden said to IGN. “And yeah, it’s terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I hate that we have to do that. So we’re trying to balance that between… the 99 percent of users going to have a good experience, how can we help make that happen without giving one more tool to the bad actor to go in and ruin the experience for others?”

“We don’t want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that,” he said.

I mean… that still doesn’t make sense to me, guys. Maybe have a record of all the users’ recent usernames, like steam does, if you are really so worried about that. Or, I don’t know, limit the amount of times someone can change their username. Once a month. Once a year, even. Or just do what Microsoft does and flat out charge for the privilege. But that excuse you just gave reeks of dishonesty and just sounds ingenuous.